The subject matter of this application is generally related to information presentation.
Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Unfortunately, even when armed with demographic studies and entirely reasonable assumptions about the typical audience of various media outlets, advertisers recognize that a non-trivial portion of their ad budget is simply wasted. Moreover, it is very difficult to identify and eliminate such waste. Recently, advertising over more interactive media has become popular. For example, as the number of people using the Internet has exploded, advertisers have come to appreciate media and services offered over the Internet as a potentially powerful way to advertise.
Web site-based advertisements (“ads” also referred to as “Web ads”) are some times presented to their advertising audience in the form of “banner ads”—i.e., a rectangular box that includes graphic components. When a member of the advertising audience (hereinafter referred to as a “viewer” or “user” without loss of generality) selects one of these banner ads by clicking on it, embedded hypertext links typically direct the viewer to the advertiser's Web site. This process, wherein the viewer selects an ad, is commonly referred to as a “click-through” (“click-through” is intended to cover any user selection). The ratio of the number of click-throughs to the number of impressions of the ad (i.e., the number of times an ad is displayed) is commonly referred to as the “click-through rate” of the ad.
Online social networks have become popular for professional and/or social networking, and are thus popular locations for placing advertisements. Some online social networks provide content items that may be of interest to users, including identification of other users and/or groups that may of interest to a user. Advertisement placement on social networking sites is challenging because such sites have users with many different interests. Accordingly, many advertisements, e.g., advertisements directed to particular products, may not be of interest to many users of an online social network.